Some PvP badges should be purchasable from Luna in Echo or Oroboros

[KaizenSoze]

PvP is dead on most of the HC servers.

 

Badgers have to resort to second accounts, so they have players to kill.

 

The whole arena system is a mess, Pentab, Septad, and Swiss draws are tedious buggy glitch fests.

 

Make the badges expensive, more than 100 merits each. So, as not to trivialize them.

 

I am not saying all PvP badges should be purchasable. Just a few that would required multiple account to complete solo.

 

Specifically:

Kill X players in PvP zone

Pentad, Septad, Swiss draw

Arena/Gladiator kill X

[TheZag]

Id recommend making the arena cross server and see if thats able to get matches going.  When i check there tends to be 10ish people signed up in different events but not enough to get a certain battle started.  If that was for all servers then 50ish people entering the que should get some battles to pop.

[Greycat]

No. Absolutely not. After all, if you do that, why stop there? Healing badges are hard to get on some ATs, those should be purchaseable too. Oh, and getting mezzed? What about those ATs with mez protection? Damage badges, too. Some ATs or powersets are not exactly high damage, those take *forever.* Oh, and how about killing all those Rikti monkeys for zookeeper?

 

No. Make some friends. Arrange things with coalitons (or just other badgers.)  Arrange times to do things with them. Otherwise, frankly, there's no point to the badges.

[KaizenSoze]

25 minutes ago, Greycat said:

No. Absolutely not. After all, if you do that, why stop there? Healing badges are hard to get on some ATs, those should be purchaseable too. Oh, and getting mezzed? What about those ATs with mez protection? Damage badges, too. Some ATs or powersets are not exactly high damage, those take *forever.* Oh, and how about killing all those Rikti monkeys for zookeeper?

 

No. Make some friends. Arrange things with coalitons (or just other badgers.)  Arrange times to do things with them. Otherwise, frankly, there's no point to the badges.

Oh lord. Overreact much. I am talking about badges that require most people to have multiple accounts given the current state of PvP. You go on some nonsensical tear about some slipper slop. Not the same thing!

 

Have you tried the arena recently? It's a buggy mess.

 

When I got my last badger completed. I manged to get some SG mates together for the pentab, septab, and swiss draw.

 

It was a god awful bug ridden mess. We would have to restart the match selection multiple times because it would just flake.

 

We spent 45 mins just to get two people the damn swiss draw badge, because it kept glitching. They aren't going to fix arena code any time. I am suggesting an alternative.

[Greycat]

17 minutes ago, KaizenSoze said:

Oh lord. Overreact much.

 

Nope.

 

And hard to get? You mention "kill x people in a PVP zone." You do not need a second account. You need to ... *ask someone to help.* Arrange a time. Go punch each other. Done. Tedious? Sure. Hard? No. Require second account? No. Any reason to make it purchaseable because of supposed difficulty? Absofreakinglutely not.

 

They don't even award anything but another badge. So it's not hampering anything but a badge count.

Edited December 15, 2021 by Greycat

[Aoide]

What I'm about to say is as someone who used to be a Badger back on Live, but who hasn't tried to get the PvP Badges on Homecoming, thus I do not know how well the PvP system (especially on The Server side) is currently working in related to Badges. But as someone who did have a chunk of these Badges back on Live, I can say that a lot of the time it felt like they've always been broken.

 

With that said I fully agree that some of the PvP badges might need to be fixed if things are (still?) broken, I don't think making them cheap (and 100 Merits is cheap) or easy is the way to go.  Especially since back on Live a lot of those Badges were buggy as well and either insanely easy or insanely hard at times to get.

 

Case in point, it was fairly easy to get the various Weight Class related Arena PvP badges for a while back on Live.  All you had to do was sign up enough characters for an automatically scheduled bout that it would read as full.  It didn't matter if they were all actually online though, since at the time the Arena PvP server didn't clear out characters that weren't online.  Thus you could sign up enough alts to trick the system into thinking that match was full, it'd start, and whatever alt you had online would be able to join the Arena match and would 'win' by default, thus getting the badge.

 

While that bug may (or may not) have been fixed, it did make it easy to get those badges for a good chunk of Badgers back in the day for a long while.

 

On the other hand some of the other Badges (I forget if it was Septad, Pentad,or Swiss, and it was at least when they were first introduced back on Live, they may have been fixed as well) were broken in a way that made it depend on pure blind luck to get them.  Simply put you could get a group together to try and make it so people would throw matches to get them, thus the last man standing would get the badge.  Unfortunately at the time the game was borked in a way that it didn't matter if you won a match, it would just randomly claim one person or another 'Won' and shove them into the next round.  Thus if you weren't chosen by the broken system as the 'Winner' you could never get the badges.

 

Now, with that said, if the current Devs wanted to change the badges so that you had to do something else (i.e. possibly killing a certain number of enemies in a PvP zone, simply taking part in PvP matches, Accolades for collecting other PvP related badges, etc.) , it might not be a bad.  But as I said, that depends on IF they are actually broken Code/Server wise.

 

Also, since it's been brought up in relation to this...

 

44 minutes ago, Greycat said:

After all, if you do that, why stop there? Healing badges are hard to get on some ATs, those should be purchaseable too. Oh, and getting mezzed? What about those ATs with mez protection? Damage badges, too. Some ATs or powersets are not exactly high damage, those take *forever.*

 

Healing Badges aren't that hard to get, especially if you have access to Red Side and enough Incarnate Threads.  You just need to get an Destiny Rebirth Core, Head to one of those ledges where there's lines of Arachnos (that don't con as enemies) exercising, set your Rebirth Core to go off as an Auto Power, and afk.  Likewise I've had Badgers tell me ways to AFK farm for those Mez and Damage (both Damage Dealing and Damage Taken) badges.  They aren't impossible.  But IF, and only IF there isn't a reasonable way to get these badges (i.e. via Server issues, Broken Code, or even just badly Buggy Code), then maybe finding other ways to get them should be examined.

 

Edited December 15, 2021 by Aoide
Small Clarification

[KaizenSoze]

27 minutes ago, Aoide said:

On the other hand some of the other Badges (I forget if it was Septad, Pentad,or Swiss, and it was at least when they were first introduced back on Live, they may have been fixed as well) were broken in a way that made it depend on pure blind luck to get them.  Simply put you could get a group together to try and make it so people would throw matches to get them, thus the last man standing would get the badge.  Unfortunately at the time the game was borked in a way that it didn't matter if you won a match, it would just randomly claim one person or another 'Won' and shove them into the next round.  Thus if you weren't chosen by the broken system as the 'Winner' you could never get the badges.

You're right about Swiss Draw, it's really messed up.

 

I am not 100% certain this is correct, because it was a year ago. I followed an SG mates instructions and got the badge this way.

 

The player that wants to get the badge needs to win the match and also be second in the match list. Not second place in ranking, second position in the list when the match is started.

 

Make absolutely no sense, but there it is.

[Faultline]

Last I checked, Pentad and Septad can be obtained with just two people on different ATs, because they will fill different slots in the Pentad/Septad and allow it to begin if it's not rated. There are probably other badges that rely on validation that doesn't happen in unrated matches.

 

Swiss Draw is completely broken and has always been, because the arena system doesn't transfer match data correctly between mapservers, so the "first" team on each round is the one that always advances.

 

There is a plan to fix Swiss Draw by having all the matches happen on a single mapserver, with the players in different vision phases to each other; I did some code commits to test this a week ago before going on break.

[Bionic_Flea]

/jranger.

 

I don't like purchasable badges, including the already existing ones.  So put me down as a firm no on adding any.

[Mezmera]

24 minutes ago, Bionic_Flea said:

/jranger.

 

I don't like purchasable badges, including the already existing ones.  So put me down as a firm no on adding any.

 

Agree.  If you want the badge I'm certain there's someone else looking or willing to help.  Obtainable badges are a way to sway people towards certain activities if they want to show off all of their flair.  The creators of all this content wanted you to experience everything they created, even those scary pvp areas.  

 

But as a non-badger, unless it's tied to an accolade, I rather do like the idea of all badges being purchasable from Luna.  Let us billionaire's earn it the billionaire way.  Hardwork, time and effort?!  Pfft!

 

Though I'm surprised Amazon hasn't wanted to get in on this yet.  

 

Move over @Bloodom and @Kwof 1581 here I come!

Edited December 15, 2021 by Mezmera

[KaizenSoze]

36 minutes ago, Faultline said:

Last I checked, Pentad and Septad can be obtained with just two people on different ATs, because they will fill different slots in the Pentad/Septad and allow it to begin if it's not rated. There are probably other badges that rely on validation that doesn't happen in unrated matches.

 

Swiss Draw is completely broken and has always been, because the arena system doesn't transfer match data correctly between mapservers, so the "first" team on each round is the one that always advances.

 

There is a plan to fix Swiss Draw by having all the matches happen on a single mapserver, with the players in different vision phases to each other; I did some code commits to test this a week ago before going on break.

Could you elaborate on the Pentab and Septad?

 

I tried with two different ATs. Tried all the different pentab types, hero, villian, custom... The start match button would enable, but it wouldn't start the count down.

 

I had the matches set to unranked.

[Faultline]

Okay, I just checked, and I was misremembering: it's two characters of the same AT. Different ATs are assigned to the same team until it's full, but two characters with the same AT will be assigned to different teams and allow the match to start. I just tested with two controllers and got Pentad Victor by defeating the other character, then have that character (the defeated one) leave the map, rather than wait for the timer.

 

Edit: if both characters of the same AT end in the same team, just switch to Freeform Teams, then switch back to Pentad, that should redistribute them to separate teams.

[KaizenSoze]

1 hour ago, Faultline said:

Okay, I just checked, and I was misremembering: it's two characters of the same AT. Different ATs are assigned to the same team until it's full, but two characters with the same AT will be assigned to different teams and allow the match to start. I just tested with two controllers and got Pentad Victor by defeating the other character, then have that character (the defeated one) leave the map, rather than wait for the timer.

 

Edit: if both characters of the same AT end in the same team, just switch to Freeform Teams, then switch back to Pentad, that should redistribute them to separate teams.

Thank you I was able to get the pentad badge. It was very glitchy, I had to try several times before randomly it worked.

 

Three interesting things:

Arachnos Widows (Night Widow and Fortunata) was listed as Arachnos Soldier

Arachnos Soldier (Bane) was listed as Arachnos Widow

I was able to get it to work with one Widow and one Bane. I had reset the match and invites several times. Flip between freeform and custom pentad. Then it just worked one time. Good enough.

[macskull]

Big /jranger on this one. Sure, the arena interface and swiss draw being horribly broken make some of these a nightmare, but if anything that should be reason to rewrite the arena interface rather than make purchasable badges. I'm cautiously optimistic about this happening in the future, especially given Faultline's comment upthread. IMO the only badges which should be purchasable are badges tied to a specific time-locked event, like the old anniversary badges are now.

Edited December 16, 2021 by macskull